Business

The two men who founded a South African online retail giant out of a living room

Kirsten Minnaar • 10 November 2025

Andrew Smith and Shane Dryden founded Yuppiechef, one of South Africa’s biggest kitchen and homeware businesses, out of a living room.

Today, Yuppiechef is one of South Africa’s most popular homeware stores, but it started as a small website run with no team, no office, and no marketing budget.

In the early 2000s, Smith and Dryden were building websites for other people from Smith’s living room in Plumstead, Cape Town.

They realised that if they could sell their own product, they would no longer have to sell their time. So, they got together and built a website for the “Bug Zapper”, an electric fly swatting racket, which launched in 2005.

Not long after, they had another idea for an eCommerce business – Yuppiechef. The idea was inspired by cooking shows, like Jamie Oliver.

They realised that many of these shows featured products that weren’t available to regular home cooks. Smith and Dryden approached a chef friend and asked which 12 tools they have in their kitchen that ordinary people don’t have.

So, in August 2006, they launched the Yuppiechef eCommerce website with a small 32-product range, based on the recommendations of their friend.

“When we started Yuppiechef back in 2006, we knew there were products that South Africans wanted for their kitchens that weren’t easily available to them,” Smith said on his LinkedIn.

“The idea came from our passion for food and cooking, and a jealousy for what we saw on international cooking shows and during our travels.”

As a small start-up, the business was run out of Smith’s Plumstead lounge, which posed some challenges. The space wasn’t very large, and since Smith had two young children at the time, they had to keep quiet during afternoon nap times.

Growing the business

At the start, Smith and Dryden were only dedicating a few hours a week to Yuppiechef. They even discussed closing the business to focus on their other, more lucrative, websites.

They made their first sale in August 2006 to Dryden’s father. “After that, there was nobody because nobody knew about Yuppiechef. We didn’t have any money to market it,” Smith said at a Heavy Chef conference.

In the next few months, they made a few more sales to some of their friends. It wasn’t until November 2006 that someone they didn’t know bought a product from Yuppiechef.

They didn’t have any payment facilities set up, so the customer had to make an EFT payment to a business she had never heard of before and trust that the products would be delivered.

Smith and Dryden were ecstatic with the sale and, wanting to prove that they were, in fact, real people, decided to write her a hand-written card, which they sent with the order.

They continued this practice of sending-hand written letters with their orders. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of handwritten letters would be sent from Yuppiechef.

“We would walk down the road to go to the little stationary store to buy the envelopes to buy the pink paper that we put in the box,” Smith said. “It was it was a very manual process.”

As time went on, they started selling more products. One day, they sold a kitchen aid mixer, which went for around R2,000 to R3,000 at the time. They couldn’t believe that they had managed to sell something so expensive.

Slowly, the business started growing. The first person they hired was a generalist who did everything from answering the phone to packing boxes.

When the time came to hire their second employee, they realised that they needed to move to a bigger space.

Up until that point, their operations were still being run out of Smith’s living room, where they did everything from running the website to storing products and packing boxes. So, they moved their business to Westlake Business Park in Cape Town.

Expanding the offering

As the business continued to grow, they also expanded Yuppiechef’s product range to include items like furniture, bathroom accessories and edible goods.

In October 2017, Yuppiechef opened its first physical store at Willowbridge Centre, in Cape Town’s Northern Suburbs.

“It has been 11 years since we shipped the first Yuppiechef order from my lounge,” Smith said. “eCommerce enabled us to start a retail business with no stock, staff or expensive rentals.”

“We have grown into a team of 85, with a warehouse and thousands of products, and have enjoyed being part of a pioneering industry in South Africa.”

He explained that, for a long time, the company believed that eCommerce was the future of retail, and that eventually this channel would ‘win’ and the others would ‘die’.

“We were wrong,” he said. “We believe that the future of retail is ‘omni-channel’, which means a combination of physical stores and eCommerce.”

Yuppiechef proceeded to open two more Cape Town stores in the following year, a strategy that paid off in spades.

To put it into context, their online store took a bit less than 800 days to achieve its first R1 million turnover. Their V&A Waterfront store, which opened in October 2018, achieved that same turnover in under 15 days.

Today, Yuppiechef has 23 physical stores spread between Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, Mbombela and Bloemfontein.

A new venture

In 2021, Mr Price acquired Yuppiechef for around R470 million. Although Smith and Dryden were meant to stay on to keep heading up the company, they decided to leave Yuppiechef in 2022.

“They have both realised that the years of building the brand and getting the business to the place of sale have taken their toll,” Mr Price told Fin24.

Mr Price added that Smith and Dryden also realised that their passion and skills lie in starting new businesses, rather than the second phase of growth and scaling.

After taking some time off, that is exactly what they did. Smith and Dryder announced the launch of their new company, Brave Hardy, in 2023.

Just like they recognised a gap in the kitchen gear space when starting Yuppiechef, they saw a similar gap in the outdoor gear market.

“There are many high-quality brands and products for camping, hiking, and outdoor living that aren’t readily available in South Africa,” Smith said.

“We have launched Brave Hardy as an importer, distributor, retailer, and perhaps even local manufacturer of high quality outdoor products.”

They started the business with just two brands, and were responding to queries and packing orders themselves.

“This hands-on approach is how we started Yuppiechef, and we’re excited to bring the same energy to Brave Hardy. We enjoy the consulting, investing and advising roles we have picked up this year, and these will continue,” they said.

“But we are builders at heart, and we feel that working on a nascent business of our own brings more energy and relevance to the other companies we help.”

Today, the business stocks 37 well-known, high quality outdoor brands, such as Stanley, AeroPress, Hydro Flask and Leatherman.

“I thought embarking on this journey a second time might feel routine, but the thrill is as strong as ever,” Smith explained.

“I find myself eagerly refreshing the dashboard, awaiting each new customer with the same anticipation as my very first online sale.”